Under Current Outside Income Rules, White Legislators Earn the Most

 

By Bill Mahoney 

ALBANY — Under Albany’s rules governing lawmakers’ outside income, the most significant factor determining how much an elected official earns is the color of his or her skin.

In the system of legislative salaries that's currently being debated by the state's leaders, lawmakers haven’t had a pay raise since 1998 but are allowed to earn unlimited amounts of outside income. There are significant differences in outside income among legislators of different demographic groups: White legislators earn an average of $35,273 per year from outside jobs, compared to $2,733 for African American lawmakers and $11,333 for Latinos.

When all sorts of household income are included, white lawmakers and their spouses brought in an average of $274,007 in 2015, double the $139,270 earned by their African-American colleagues and the $133,998 brought in by their Latino counterparts. And the differences are even sharper when totals are adjusted for the cost of living in members’ districts, according to a POLITICO New York analysis of data maintained by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the state comptroller’s office, the Empire Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Source: Politico (via The Empire Report)